Recovery of stolen artworks is often a result of long-term sleuthing and tips as the goods change hands through sale and resale.
Upon recovery charges of receiving stolen goods may be filed while the thief remains unknown.
For example, a million dollar theft of Nepalese and Tibetan art objects in New York in 1978 was solved eleven years later and items were recovered in the South Los Angeles home of an original suspect who was then charged not with theft but "on suspicion of receiving and transporting stolen property".
A Rubens painting stolen from a Spanish museum in 1985 was recovered in Florida in 1991 by an undercover US customs agent when four Miami residents tried to sell the painting to him.
Alert and honest auction house or art shop employees may recognize a stolen object brought to them in all innocence for sale or evaluation resulting in recovery but no charges as in the case of two portraits stolen in London in 1990, bought at a London market for 145 pounds in 1993 and brought to Sotheby's for evaluation.
(They were worth 65,000 pounds.) On the other hand police sometimes receive tips that allow them to move quickly against art thieves.
In May 1989 police in Rio de Janeiro received a phone tip, staked out an apartment and were able to recover millions of dollars of artwork stolen earlier in the month, to arrest five men and to identify three other suspects.
